The ceremony was held at the Gates of Heaven, the stateliest temple in Cairo. Afterward, the couple traveled by horse-drawn carriage to Jean Weinberg’s photography studio to have their portrait taken. Weinberg, who had worked at the court of Atatürk, was the most talented photographer in all of Egypt. Yet even he was worried when he positioned the couple side by side for their official portrait. The bride was so small she risked being completely overshadowed by her husband.
Weinberg slid a small velvet footstool beneath Edith’s feet. It promptly vanished under yards and yards of hand-sewn lace and satin.
The portrait came out so perfectly that Weinberg placed it at the center of his shop window in downtown Cairo, where it remained for months.
He signed his name in black ink, like an artist who has produced a masterpiece.
It is indeed a wonderful shot. Leon has abandoned his trademark white suits in favor of a classic double-breasted black tuxedo. He carries a top hat and white gloves and wears a sprig of lily of the valley tucked inside his lapel. Edith, a mist of dark hair framing her small, porcelain features, smiles slightly as she holds a large bouquet of white flowers—dozens of lilies and roses that trail from her hands.
The two are standing almost shoulder to shoulder.
It is an illusion, a scene from the same movie that opened at the café. No Selznick or Wilder could have scripted it better, this wartime romance. The last shot is of the couple embracing as they ride in their horse-drawn carriage around one of the most alluring cities in the world, a city touched by World War II yet at the same time shielded from its ravages.
Edith and Leon’s wedding portrait, signed by Jean Weinberg.
Except it wasn’t a movie, because Leon and Edith were my parents. And the aftereffects of their café courtship would reverberate years later and thousands of miles away.
The account of their first encounter in the spring of 1943 would hold me in thrall long after I learned that much of what I’d treasured was make-believe, as illusory as their standing shoulder to shoulder in Jean Weinberg’s photograph.
I held on to the glamorous image even when all glamour had gone from their lives and mine, and colonial Cairo was no more, and Jewish Cairo was a distant memory, and we had been banished to a string of shabby hotels in Paris and New York, until finally ending up in a corner of Brooklyn no wider than ten blocks, where thousands of other refugees from the Levant had also fetched up.
As we moved from country to country, from city to city, I learned to find solace in the fable of my parents’ love affair. I would ask my mother to tell me of the romantic encounter again and again, I’d grill my father for details about that magical first meeting with Edith at La Parisiana.
“I find you very beautiful. Would it be possible for us to meet?”
What had drawn him to Edith? Why had he decided to marry her after spurning so many other women? Like so much of the lore that surrounded my father, Leon, each facet of his life took on a sheen and luminescence akin to the garments he favored, and I was never able to discern what was real and what had been artfully woven.
“Loulou, il faut reconstruire le foyer,” my mother would tell me when I was a little girl; We must rebuild the hearth. It was a line from one of her favorite books, a work of fiction. At first, I didn’t know what she meant. We were living in a cramped city apartment, not some country house with a fireplace.
Eventually, I came to understand that I was the chosen one, entrusted with the impossible task of taking our shattered family and our lost home and restoring them.
My point of reference became the photograph, so that I found myself always trying to recapture the promise of that wedding portrait, and more potent still, the vision of that dashing man in white sharkskin wooing the pretty dark-haired girl in a café in old, vanished Cairo.
BOOK I
THE CAPTAIN
CAIRO
1942–1963
CHAPTER 1
The Days and Nights of the Captain
On the first Thursday night of every month, Cairo grew completely still as every man, from the pashas in their palaces to the fellahin in their hovels, huddled by the radio and motioned to their wives and children not to disturb them. It was the night when Om Kalsoum, the Nightingale of the Nile, the greatest singer Egypt had ever known, broadcast live from a theater in the Ezbekeya section, her voice so transcendent and evocative that her fans could picture exactly how she looked as she came out onto the stage, enveloped in the lush white lace dress that softened and transformed her features.
This daughter of a village sheik had a cult following—porters and potentates, the intellectual elite and the illiterate masses, the beggars and the king—especially the king. But the most passionate audience for her songs about lost love and unrequited love and love forsaken weren’t starry-eyed housewives but their husbands and brothers and grown sons.
To them, she was simply al-Sitt, the Lady.
She’d begin promptly at nine, fluttering her white voile handkerchief this way and that. Since each of her songs could last half an hour or more, her concerts went on well past midnight. “In the Name of Love,” “What Is Left for Me?” “Tomorrow, I Leave,” or her poignant classic “Ana Fintezarak”—“I Am Waiting for You”—they had heard these songs a thousand times, yet they still found them enrapturing, especially the verses that she would repeat over and over, each time with a slightly different inflection, a varied tempo, a changed mood.
It was the only night my father didn’t leave the house or even his chair. He’d sit as close as possible to the radio, unable to pull himself away.
In the years before he met Edith, my father led the life of a consummate bachelor. He was rarely home, and when he left the apartment on Malaka Nazli Street he shared with his mother, Zarifa, and his young nephew, Salomone, it was not to return till dawn. His womanizing was the stuff of legend, as much a part of his mystique as his white suits, and there were countless other women before my mother, including, some whispered, the Diva.
Except for Friday nights, he didn’t even bother to stay for supper. If he came back at all after work, it was to go immediately to his room and dress for the evening ahead, an elaborate ritual that he seemed to enjoy almost as much as what the night held in store.
He was meticulous and more than a little vain. He had assembled a wardrobe made by Cairo’s finest tailors in every possible fabric—linen, Egyptian cotton, English tweed, vicuna, along with shirts made of silk imported from India. There were also the sharkskin suits and jackets he favored above all others, especially to wear at night. These were carefully hung in a corner of the closet, and if the local macwengi, or presser, dared to bring back a pair of trousers without the crease or fold exactly so, Leon would berate him and make him redo the job.
He always wore a diamond ring, and for the evening, he would add a tie clip in the shape of a horseshoe. White gold, encrusted with several diamonds, the clip was his good-luck talisman, and like all men who enjoy the shuffle of a deck of cards and the spin of the roulette wheel, my father was a firm believer in lucky charms.
His final act was to dab the eau de cologne Arlette on his hands and neck and temple. It was a popular, locally made aftershave with a fresh citrusy scent that conjured the Mediterranean. Long after he’d left, the house still bore what the Egyptians would call, in their characteristic mixture of French and Arabic, le zeft du citron—the waft of lemon.
Leon.
As he went out, Salomone, my teenage cousin from Milan, would poke his head from behind the novel he was reading to bid him good night, a tad enviously perhaps, and Zarifa would kiss both his cheeks lovingly but with some reproach in her magnificent blue eyes.
My grandmother came from Aleppo, the ancient city in Syria whose culture was far more rigid and conservative than Cairo’s. She was troubled by her son’s nightly forays and the fact he was still unattached and showed no desire whatsoever to settle down. Even now, in his forties, his restlessness continued to get the bet
ter of him. Until Edith, he never brought a woman home to Malaka Nazli, as that would mean she was the chosen one, and he had no desire to choose.
My father was a study in motion, taking long, brisk military strides early each morning to get from the house to his synagogue, then on to his business meetings, his cafés, and in the evening, his poker game and his dancing and his women. Because he tried to stay out of the house as much as possible, how convenient that his bedroom was at the front, facing Malaka Nazli, the wide, graceful boulevard named in honor of Queen Nazli, Farouk’s mother. Because his room was only a couple of feet away from the door, he could slip in and out as he pleased.
Years later, I would hear that the lustrous lady of song, the devoutly Muslim Om Kalsoum, who was raised in a remote village where her dad had been the imam, had been my father’s mistress. It was one of the many stories that persisted about my dad’s prowess with women before and likely after he was married.
What I heard not simply about his womanizing but about every sphere of his life had a mythic quality, so outsize as to seem apocryphal. There was the fanatical devotion to religion and the hedonistic streak that compelled him to venture out in search of all that Cairo had to offer. There was the passion for clothes and food and women that made him a fixture at the leading restaurants and patisseries by day, and the cabarets, dance halls, and cinémas en plein air by night. Even his height and larger-than-life physique were cause for comment, as he was muscular and fair in a land of small, swarthy men.
The affair with Om Kalsoum had caused enough of a stir for word of it to spread in the family. It wasn’t simply that a singer worshipped by millions had become involved with my father, because his ease with women was legendary. It didn’t even seem incongruous that a star whose songs were all about the obsessive, indefinable aspects of love and desire would enter into a liaison with my obsessive, indefinable father.
Rather, what took everyone aback was that a devout Jew, scion of hundreds of years and consecutive generations of noted rabbis and scholars, would become involved with an Arab woman who was also a very pious Muslim. And perhaps as surprising, that a connoisseur of female beauty who didn’t even deign to look at a woman unless she met his exacting standards would have a liaison with someone who, despite her opulent wardrobe and finery, was rather a plain Jane. Her talent was the ultimate aphrodisiac.
Om Kalsoum.
My father’s nocturnal wanderings would typically begin a block or two away from home, at the Bet el Om—the House of the Mother. That is how Farida Sabagh’s home on nearby School Street was known. Tall and heavyset, Farida could no longer easily walk through her own doorway, which was always kept open. Yet her heart was as ample as her girth and she had an expansive, outgoing personality that made everyone want to come to the Bet el Om.
When Leon would arrive at her building, the porter, a simple peasant from the south, leapt to his feet. “Captain,” he’d cry, raising his hand to his head in an awkward attempt at a military salute. Leon would smile, slip him a piaster, and continue on upstairs.
Farida didn’t seem to mind the men who descended on her house night after night for rounds of poker. She liked to entertain her husband’s friends and would stand there smiling and greeting them, “Etfaddalouh, etfaddalouh”—Welcome, welcome—before retreating to the kitchen to prepare some tasty treat that would sustain them for the intense gambling ahead.
Farida ran a rollicking household, with one hard-and-fast rule: bad news was absolutely forbidden. She wanted nothing to dampen her natural optimism, or spoil her typically euphoric, expansive mood, and the joy that reigned within. And so, if there were dismal developments about the war, and there seemed to be only dismal developments in 1942, she didn’t want to hear about them.
Cairo was both protected from the Nazis’ relentless march across Europe and Africa and profoundly affected by it. Tens of thousands of British troops were now stationed in and around the city. It was impossible to get a seat in one of the dozens of movie theaters because they were overflowing with British officers, and once the theaters emptied at midnight or one in the morning, the soldiers would move on to their favorite cafés, and stay nearly till dawn. After they’d had far too much to drink at La Parisiana and other watering holes, they lay sprawled on the sidewalks, and the military police were a familiar sight driving up and down the streets of Cairo, hoisting anyone who had passed out onto their paddy wagons.
To those who resented the colonial influence and wanted Egypt for the Egyptians, the English were a hated reminder of the foreign domination that had to end, war or no war. But for the Jews and foreigners who lived in terror of the Nazis, les Anglais were their only hope—their protectors and benefactors.
The war had even reached inside Malaka Nazli. My cousin Salomone had arrived in December 1937 from Italy, where Mussolini was about to make life impossible for Jews. His mother, Bahia—my father’s older sister—had moved from Cairo to Milan in the early 1920s after marrying her husband. Italy had seemed filled with opportunities, and the family had thrived, but now they were stuck in a country that kept issuing ever-harsher decrees against its Jews, including racial laws in 1938 to rival those of Nazi Germany. Salomone had every intention of returning to Italy, at least for a visit, but the war made that impossible. He longed to be with his parents during their travails, but my father, exerting his indomitable will, forced him to stay put. Consoling himself with letters that flowed constantly between Cairo and Milan, Salomone focused on his studies, made friends, and tried to enjoy the comforts that life in Egypt offered, including the abundant love my grandmother Zarifa was more than prepared to lavish on her handsome, sensitive grandson.
My father was always amazed at the difference between his mother’s house and the House of the Mother. In contrast to Malaka Nazli, which was quiet, contemplative, and somewhat mournful, the apartment on School Street was a constant party, with servants bringing plates filled with tasty hot kebabs and pitchers of cool lemonade made with fresh lemons.
On a typical poker night, most of the players folded by midnight and went home to their families. Leon wasn’t ready to return to Malaka Nazli. He had the porter find him a taxi and headed to one of his favorite nightclubs, Covent Garden, the open-air dancing paradise, or Madame Badia’s, the cabaret where Oriental men in tarboosh sat next to British officers in uniform and ogled the gorgeous belly dancers.
Madame Badia’s girls were renowned for their beauty and skill. They performed in lush veiled costumes that evoked some Hollywood fantasy of the Arabian Nights. The Opera Casino opened in the 1920s, and Badia Masabni, its owner, a former belly dancer turned businesswoman, liked to showcase the finest dancers in all of Egypt. She had a good eye, and many of her young women were so talented they went on to become stars in Cairo’s thriving movie industry.
It was possible to stop by on any given night and catch the delectable Taheya Karioka, a voluptuous brunette, perform the movements that made her the single most respected belly dancer in the Middle East—and a major draw for Madame Badia’s establishment. Taheya managed to combine skill and sensuality on the dance floor as well as on-screen, as she starred in many movies. But her love life was also legendary and she seemed to collect husbands and lovers. She and the other girls danced with elaborate props that included a sword, a dagger, even a lit candelabrum they’d carry on their head like a crown as they swayed and gyrated and the audience held its breath. Ardent fans could also sit within touching distance of Taheya’s archrival, Samia Gamal, who landed a role opposite Robert Taylor in the Hollywood extravaganza Valley of the Kings, and snared a Texas millionaire as one of her more than a dozen husbands. Some of the lesser-known girls were also fetching, and when they weren’t dancing, they could mingle with the delighted clients.
For restless souls like my dad, Cairo was a palace of pleasure, a sybaritic Red Cross station. No matter how late he arrived at Covent Garden, which featured dinner and dancing amid acres and acres of manicured gardens, the orchestra would be
playing continental melodies as hundreds of couples waltzed or did the tango or, for those under the spell of the British or the Americans, the swing or jitterbug. If he felt hungry, he could sit down as late as one or two in the morning and order a full-course dinner because this was Cairo, and the usual rules about when to dance and when to play and when to dine simply didn’t apply.
The war hit home, of course. There was severe rationing in Cairo, and many necessities, like the gasoline that housewives needed to light the Primus and cook for their families, and chefs depended on to feed their hungry clientele, became exceedingly hard to come by. But there was also a flourishing black market, and those who knew the city intimately like my father were able to get their hands on crucial items such as sugar, oil, and soap. At Groppi’s, the famed patisserie, it was possible to enjoy delicious pastries made with clarified butter as an orchestra played.
Despite all the shortages, the nightlife flourished and café society preened and the hedonistic streak of the city went almost unchecked. On a typical night, except for the abundance of soldiers out on the streets—British, of course, but also Australians, New Zealanders, South Africans, Indians, even some American GIs—as well as the refugees who had gathered from every corner of Europe, life could seem as glittering and self-indulgent as it had been in the 1920s and ’30s, when Farouk’s parents, King Fouad and Queen Nazli, reigned.
L’Auberge des Pyramides, which had opened in 1942, instantly overtook all of its rivals when it became known as Farouk’s favorite club. It featured a ballroom under the stars, and on a good night, the king was almost certain to drop by with both an entourage and a determination to seduce the prettiest woman there, or whoever appealed to him the most.
The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit Page 2
